Stanford’s Department of Management Science and Engineering (poetsandquants.com)

This particular clickbait title formula -- The X No One Has Heard About -- drives me nuts because it is so manifestly self-defeating. Obviously someone has heard about it. At the very least, the author of the piece has heard about it, and now all of their readers have heard about it too.

Of the famous founders, over half were Stanford undergrads and therefore likely were "coterm" students. That means they just added a year to their degree and got this degree tacked on. That saves lots of time and money compared to going to Stanford as a master's student. There are a lot of things that are "worth it" if you don't have to move apartments/cities and get it for half the price — but which are not nearly as worth it if you're paying double and add the friction of moving to the area in order to enroll.

Maybe it is because I am not from the US and from a country with a very different work culture, but this whole thing seems ridiculously narcissistic. A person with such a degree becoming my coworker or my boss seems like a nightmare. Even talking to someone who "made it through" such a degree is something I would rather avoid.

I've taken a few graduate courses at Stanford MS&E through their non degree program, and I give the experience three thumbs up.

I've met several of these students. It's like an MBA, but less social networking and more math. (And can be done co-term or in a year)

So does it add some value to someone who is already getting a bachelors in EE, CS or similar? Sure.

Would I put a history major with an MS&E degree in charge of anything significant? Probably not.

I suspect that the admissions rate of 7% is independent of coterms.

> Management Science

It’s jarring and galling to see management and science put together in a way that’s suggestive of management being a science. It reeks of stolen valor.

Obligatory Feynman on “sciences”: https://youtu.be/tWr39Q9vBgo?si=SYTZSNA0G-RZDguA

I met a guy who raised $250MM, and dropped out of the program. Spoiled.

Has anyone seen publicly accessible content from the startup-ish MS&E courses? I think Coursera had a MOOCified version of “Startup engineering”, but that was over a decade ago and it didn’t last long anyway. It was great back then.